When updating an app iphone waiting

Anybody who has struggled with Palm's Hot Sync or Microsoft's Active Sync can appreciate that simple and reliable desktop syncing was hugely important.

It was also an example of Apple's ability to take complicated features that had given other companies and users headaches and simplify them to the point of invisibility.

Visual voicemail was a clever trick that allowed users to jump directly to any voicemail without having to sit through endless voice prompts.

It also showed off Apple's newfound ability to cut deals with carriers.

For the sake of simplicity (and because it's a much-less awkward phrase), I'm going to indulge in a little revisionist history here and refer to all versions of the operating system as "i OS" in this piece.

Although it may be difficult to imagine now, when the original i Phone was introduced, it was actually well behind the competition when it came to a strict feature-by-feature comparison.

During the original i Phone announcement, Apple touted that it ran on the same Unix core as Mac OS X and that it used many of the same tools.

Yet all of those missing features hardly mattered and nearly everybody knew it.

Instead of competing on specs, Apple focused on getting the core experience right.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about i OS is how similar the OS as it exists today is to the OS as it existed 2007, yet the number and breadth of features that Apple has baked in since then is mind boggling.

Far from suffering from the "feature creep" that typically bogs down operating systems over time, i OS has managed to stay relatively snappy and is more internally consistent than anything else available today.